TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Jun 12, 2024

Tennessee election officials are asking the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to postpone changes to how people with felony convictions can register to vote until after this year’s elections, Tennessee Lookout reports. Officials argue there is not enough time to make the changes a federal court judge has ordered them to make. That order came in case challenging the state’s requirements for people with felony convictions who want to regain the right to vote after they have been released from prison. U.S. District Judge William Campbell ruled in May that the state violated federal voting law when requiring a group of formerly incarcerated felons convicted before 1981 to prove they were entitled to register to vote, even though the group never lost the right to vote. He also ordered the state to develop new policies and procedures for processing felony voter registrations and train election workers how to follow it.